What Do the Poor Need?  

Writing these pages in Europe allows me to look at the problem of American poverty in a way I might not have chosen had I written in America. Visiting the slums of Naples and North Africa or traveling through the Sicilian …





Indeed, They Did Grow Up Absurd  

THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD is now being enacted on the public scene. Letters recently sent to a number of corporations which were subsequently bombed stated that the bomb throwers were full of loving care for mankind and therefore felt …



The Inevitability of Songmy  

COLONEL JOSEPH BELLAS IS PROBABLY one of those ordinary officers not likely to be remembered in the annals of warfare, but he recently delivered himself of a statement that is unforgettable. The Colonel is in command of a hospital in …





History Askew  

Professor Berman’s earlier A Reader’s Guide to Shakespeare’s Plays may have been helpful. I wouldn’t know. His present guide to the intellectual life of the sixties, however, is not of much use. Both title and subtitle are misleading. This is not …





Nechayev in the Andes  

“The emancipation of the working class is the work of the working class itself,” wrote Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto. One of the tragic paradoxes of the Marxist movement has been that impatient revolutionaries—appalled by the sluggishness of history …



The CIA- Enemy or Promise  

I Mutual trust is indispensable to any democratic polity. Without it, without a sense that the political men we deal with can be assumed to be self-actuated, autonomous actors engaged in pursuing their material or ideal interests in an open …



Major Work On A Major Figure  

Rosa Luxemburg by J.P. Nettl Oxford University Press, 984 pp., $20.20 By the standards of vulgar Hegelians, such as E. H. Carr, this book should never have been written. Hegelians are concerned with the history of those movements and persons …



Tito, Rankovic and All That  

For some years now it has been assumed that when the Peoples’ Democracies of Eastern Europe are compared, “they order things better in Yugoslavia.” One begins to doubt it. Since the beginning of 1966 a number of extraordinary sessions of …



The Myth of Peasant Revolt  

Only rarely does a book immediately convey a sense that it will rank among the influential works of the time. Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth is just such a book. It is badly written, badly organized and chaotic. …